Are you overwhelmed by all the social marketing blah blah and hype, don’t worry you’re not alone.

In the 80’s it was fax machine and mobile phones, in the 90’s internet and email and this decade it’s been on-line search and web 2.0 and we’ve learnt to conquer and use all of these, social media will be no different.

The reality is that social networking and social media are set to become tomorrow’s big “everyday business tool” and whether you like it or not, want it or not, it’s here to stay and grow. What you need to do is stop complaining about it and start learning about it, figure out what it is, how it effects you and what you need to do to make it work hard for you.

This discussion is so much bigger than search engine optimisation (SEO), websites, FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter or the myriad of other websites we’re constantly being bombarded with and although they’re important, they’re only the tip of the iceberg of what you need to know and do.

This one day, hands on, extremely practical insider’s tour is just what you need to make sense of what’s happening on-line and learn how you can harness it to improve your bottom and top line.

Morris Miselowski, recently named by Australia Post as “one of the world’s leading futurists”, is a hands on business futurist and strategist working globally as well as in demand professional speaker and media commentator. He will personally escort you on this one day virtual on-line insiders tour and show you the world of the not too distant business future, and explain on-line social media and networking, how to make sense of it, how to use it in your business before your competitors do and most importantly how to make money from it – today.

In this weeks regular 3AW radio segment, Morris and Dennis Walter, discuss the future of mobile phones, why 21.3 million Australian need 22.6 mobile phones, what mobile phones will be used for in the future and take listeners calls.

8. Help people broaden their perspective by creating diverse teams and rotating employees into new projects — especially ones they are fascinated by.

9. Ask questions about everything. After asking questions, ask different questions. After asking different questions, ask them in a different way.

10. Ensure a high level of personal freedom and trust. Provide more time for people to pursue new ideas and innovations.

11. Encourage everyone to communicate. Provide user-friendly systems to make this happen.

12. Instead of seeing creativity training as a way to pour knowledge into people’s heads, see it as a way to grind new glasses for people so they can see the world in a different way.

13. Learn to tolerate ambiguity and cope with soft data. It is impossible to get all the facts about anything. “Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts,” said Einstein.

14. Embrace and celebrate failure. 50 to 70 per cent of all new product innovations fail at even the most successful companies. The main difference between companies who succeed at innovation and those who don’t isn’t their rate of success — it’s the fact that successful companies have a LOT of ideas, pilots, and product innovations in the pipeline.

16. When you’re promoting innovation in-house, always promote the benefits of a new idea or project, not the features.

17. Don’t focus so much on taking risks, per se, but on taking the risks OUT of big and bold ideas.

18. Encourage people to get out of their offices and silos. Encourage people to meet informally, one-on-one, and in small groups.

19. Think long term. Since the average successful “spin-off” takes about 7.5 years, the commitment to innovation initiatives need to be well beyond “next quarter.”

20. Create a portfolio of opportunities: short-term, long-term, incremental, and discontinuous. Just like an investment portfolio, balance is critical.

21. Involve as many people as you can in the development of your innovation initiative so you get upfront buy-in. This is the “go-slow now to go-fast later” approach. (The opposite approach of having a few people go off to a desert island and come back with their concept is almost always doomed to failure).

22. Improve the way brainstorming sessions and meetings are facilitated in your organization. Create higher standards and practices.

23. Make sure people are working on the right issues. Identify specific business challenges to focus on. Be able to frame these issues as questions that start with the words, “How can we?”

24. Communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate and then communicate again. Deliver each important message at least six times.

26. Don’t focus on growth. Growth is a product of successful innovation. Focus on the process of becoming adept at taking ideas from the generation stage to the marketplace.

27. Make customers your innovation partners, while realizing that customers are often limited to incremental innovations, not breakthrough ones.

28. Understand that the best innovations are initiated by individuals acting on their own at the periphery of your organization. Don’t make your innovation processes so rigid that they get in the way of informal and spontaneous innovation efforts. Build flexibility into your design. Think “self-organizing” innovation, not “command and control” innovation.

29. Find new ways to capture learnings throughout your organization and new ways to share these learnings with everyone. Use real-life stories to transfer the learnings.

30. Stimulate interaction between segments of the company that traditionally don’t connect or collaborate with each other.

31. Develop a process of trying out new concepts quickly and on the cheap. Learn quickly what’s working and what’s not.

43. Try to get as much buy-in and support from senior leadership as you can while realizing that true change NEVER starts at the top. How often does the revolution start with the King?

44. Realize that “resource allocation” is the last bastion of Soviet-style central planning. Think of new innovation opportunities as “resource attractors.”

45. Pay particular attention to alignment. Ensure that the interests and actions of all employees are directed toward key company goals, so that any employee will recognize and respond positively to a potentially useful idea.